AMD is back in the game with its Zen architecture and, for the first time in a long time, is able to compete with Intel in the high-end desktop CPU market with its Ryzen and Threadripper processor lines. And in the GPU market, Vega has given AMD a competitive solution to go up against NVIDIA's Pascal cards. At some point in the near future, AMD will unveil a mobile APU (accelerated processor unit) lineup that combines the two architectures and make a run in the laptop sector. Early benchmarks suggests these new chips could be worth waiting for.

Over at Geekbench, a popular benchmark and hot spot where unreleased processors often poke their head, there are scores for a Ryzen 5 2500U APU. The Ryzen 5 2500U features four cores and eight threads with built-in Radeon Vega graphics. According to the new database entry, the chip also features 4MB of L3 cache. It is not clear if the processor entry represents a pre-release chip (engineering sample) or finalized sample.

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Either way, the scores are impressive. As you can see above, it posted a score of 3,625 points in the single-core portion of the benchmark, and 9,723 points in the multi-core portion that taps all available cores and threads.

Those numbers by themselves are not very meaningful, so let us give them some context. Compared to a current generation A12-9800B, which is AMD's fastest mobile Bristol Ridge APU, the new Raven Ridge is around 90 percent faster in Geekbench's multi-core test (9,723 versus 5,115) and about 56 percent faster in single-core performance (3,625 versus 2,315).

Our standard disclaimer when it comes to these sort of things applies—this is just a single benchmark, and partially for that reason, we have to be careful not to draw any premature conclusions. That said, the scores on display are in line with what AMD has been promising. AMD previously said Raven Ridge would deliver a 50 percent bump in CPU performance and 40 percent jump in GPU performance, while consuming 50 less power, compared to its 7th generation APU.

If this type of performance can hold true across the board, AMD is going to have strong mobile lineup.